Oftentimes, people perform keyword searches to identify individuals, such as those that work in a large organization. For example, a user may desire to contact an individual at an organization but does not know that person's contact information (e.g., e-mail address, phone number). Typically, the user will enter a name (e.g., last name or both the first and last name) or a portion of a name (e.g., first few letters of the person's last name) in a search field of the organization's online directory in hopes of locating the appropriate person. However, after the user enters the name or a portion of the name, the user may receive a listing of many results, such as all those individuals with the last name starting with the first few letters entered by the user in the search field for the last name. As a result, the user may not be able to identify the appropriate person.
Consequently, some searching systems provide inline photos or details for those individuals that match the information (e.g., last name) entered by the user in the search field. While it makes it easier for the user to identify the appropriate person, the user may not have knowledge of the appearance of that person. For example, the user may only have knowledge of a portion of the person's name, such as the first name of an individual that was provided to the user from someone else, such as a work colleague. Furthermore, the searching system may still generate many search results that the user has to review.
Some searching systems address such deficiencies by presenting results of those individuals in the user's social network. However, such a process will not be able to assist the user in situations where the person being searched is not in the user's social network.
As a result, there is not currently a means for efficiently allowing a user to search and identify the correct person when the user does not know or have a relationship with the person to be searched, including those outside of the user's social network.